The Young Pope

The Young Pope tells the controversial story of the beginning of Pius XIII's pontificate. Born Lenny Belardo, he is a complex and conflicted character, so conservative in his choices as to border on obscurantism, yet full of compassion towards the weak and poor. The first American pope, Pius XIII is a man of great power who is stubbornly resistant to the Vatican courtiers, unconcerned with the implications to his authority.

Hank Stuever

Daniel D'Addario

The Young Pope is as compellingly watchable as anything else you’ll find on TV. Sorrentino intuitively understands that which makes Catholicism--with its crosscurrents of guilt and exuberant hope as well as the opulent pageantry of the Vatican--fascinating grist for storytelling. And he’s unafraid to go what seems at first too far in service of a story that finds the universal in one warped leader’s specificities.

Robert Lloyd

Kevin Fallon

It’s the kind of blank canvas needed to host Sorrentino’s compelling strangeness, making The Young Pope alternatingly addicting and infuriating, like the most interesting ambitious dramas competing to make noise in the age of #PeakTV.

Rob Owen

The show is too smart to be so easily dismissed, but whether its depiction of Vatican politics--and especially its title character’s abrasive personality--warrant devotion will be in the eye of the beholder. Lenny’s not a likable character, but The Young Pope offers addictive stories of unpredictable political maneuvering.

Sophie Gilbert

The Young Pope is frequently tedious in a very dazzling way. But it’s also an extraordinary portrait of the kind of loneliness and neediness that sparks in some men an almost psychopathic quest to dominate others, and of the myopic enablers who convince themselves that their work is God’s plan.

Matthew Gilbert

[Paulo Sorrentino] invents a coolly seductive physical world to match the oddness of his story. Even as The Young Pope slowly moves among its different tones--serious religious drama, soap opera, satire, dystopian nightmare--it remains consistent in one important quality: stark originality.

Erik Adams

The Young Pope keeps its audience at a distance, but it also keeps that audience guessing. And not just about the next curveball it’s going to throw or abrupt left turn Lenny’s going to take, but about the fundamental mysteries of faith.

Terry Terrones

The Young Pope really starts to click when Lenny's mentor, Cardinal Michael Spencer (James Cromwell), enters in episode two. When someone finally stands up to the power mad pontiff, the series excels. It still has it idiosyncrasies but much like the character himself, it takes some time to see the potential of The Young Pope.

Glenn Garvin

Merely dazed: stylistically, narratively, theologically. Part soap opera, part jeremiad, and part dark comedy, its various incarnations don't always mesh very well. It strives for epic magnificence and falls well short of coherence...And yet it's kind of entertaining.

Mark A. Perigard

Dave Nemetz

The Young Pope feels more like an eccentric foreign film than a TV series. Except it is a TV series--and little quirks that might seem charming in a 90-minute movie can begin to grate across several episodes.

David Wiegand

HBO made five of the series’ 10 episodes available to critics, and perhaps The Young Pope makes sense as a whole. Half the loaf, however, is half-baked. In spite of that, and because of wonderful performances by James Cromwell, as an older cardinal who was Belardo’s mentor and resents that he wasn’t chosen pope himself, Cécile de France as the Vatican’s marketing director, and Orlando, The Young Pope has something that makes you keep with it.

Mark Dawidziak

The problem with The Young Pope is that it never artfully draws you in deep enough to care. Created and directed by Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino ("The Great Beauty"), it is drearily paced, choppy and often self-consciously bizarre. It's beautiful to gaze upon, filled with sumptuous shots that look like majestic oil paintings. And the supporting cast is impressive.

Kristi Turnquist

At times, Sorrentino's approach is bracingly different. But many, many more times, The Young Pope leaves us alternating between admiring Sorrentino's craft and wondering why this is so lugubriously paced and cryptically written.

Josh Bell

Willa Paskin

It has languid pacing and an earnest streak about religious devotion. This streak, with its provocative but often specious and unchallenged ideas about celebrity and religiosity, fame and faith, are the only unintentionally risible aspects of the series.

Robert Bianco

Like the Vatican itself, Pope is beautiful, lush and carefully, formally composed. It’s also oddly airless and cold, more a series of striking pictures than a living and breathing slice of life, one that leaves you with no way in and little reason to care. Style doesn't just trump substance here; it's the only substance The Young Pope has. And that seems wrong.

Brian Lowry

Chris Cabin

The Young Pope is TV’s equivalent of a dorm-room poster of Bob Marley blowing smoke or the Lenny Bruce mugshot: a depleted symbol of a radical reaction to society that finally most clearly represents the status quo.